Charles Dickens and the law

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CHARLES DICKENS AND THE LAW

CHARLES DICKENS
AND THE LAW

BY

THOMAS ALEXANDER FYFE

London
CHAPMAN & HALL, LIMITED

Edinburgh: WILLL\M HODGE

f?

H«D

PRINTED BY

WILLIAM HODGE AND COMPANY

GLASGOW AND EDINBURGH

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PREFACE

The following pages embody a Lecture
which I recently delivered to the Glasgow
Dickens Society. At the request of the
Society, I have revised it for publication in
book form.

T. A. F.

Glasgow, October, 1910.

CHARLES DICKENS AND
THE LAW

Charles Dickens was pre-eminently the
novelist of the law, and his lawyers have
a hold upon the public imagination far
surpassing that of any other author. But,
although his lawyer creations are most
widely known, he is not the only author
who has built a tale upon a legal foundation.
A few references selected at random may
be interesting by way of contrast.

Next to "Bleak House" of Dickens,
perhaps the most sustained literary effort of
this description is that delightful, if some-
what long-drawn-out, tale of seventy years
ao-o — nowadays, I fear, seldom read, even

8 Charles Dickens

by the young lawyer — " Ten Thousand a
Year." written by Samuel Warren, who was
himself a lawyer, and who built a long tale
upon a flaw in an estate title — a tale which
involved not one, but several lawsuits, not
less intricate thdin yar^idyce and Jarndyce, the
famous Chancery suit upon which Dickens
built his chief legal novel. In this book
Warren created Quirk, Gamin & Snap, who
held the field as representing the type
of sharp-practice solicitor till put in the
shade by Dodson & Fogg of "Pickwick"
fame.

Anthony Trollope, In his book " Orley
Farm," produced a novel of the law which
contains some striking legal characters,
including that typical old-time barrister
Mr. Furnival, K.C., M.P., and that delight-
ful and eccentric Old Bailey practitioner
Mr. Chaffanbrass, whose personality is akin
to more than one of the Dickens creations.

and the Law 9

and whose portrait, as thus pen-painted by
Trollope, is quite in the Dickens style :

In person Mr. Chaffanbrass is a little man, and a very
dirty little man. He has all manner of nasty tricks about
him, which make him a disagreeable neighbour. His
wig is never at ease upon his head, but is poked by him,
sometimes over one ear, and sometimes over the other,
now on the back of his head, and then on his nose ; and
it is impossible to say in which guise he looks most
cruel, most sharp, and most intolerable. His linen is
never clean, his hands never washed, and his clothes
never new. But his tongue — that moves — there is the
weapon which he knows how to use.

Smollett had rather an ambition after legal
portraiture, and in his legal novel "Sir
Launcelot Greaves " he gives this full-
length portrait of a young and painfully
respectable attorney :

Tom Clarke was a young fellow whose goodness of
heart even the exercise of his profession had not been
able to corrupt. Before strangers he never owned
himself an attorney without blushing, though he had no
reason to blush for his own practice, for he constantly
refused to engage in the cause of any client whose
character was equivocal, and was never known to act

lo Charles Dickens

with such industry as when concerned for the widow and
orphan, or any other that sued in forma pauperis.
Indeed, he was so replete with human kindness that, as
often as an afflicting story or circumstance was told in
his hearing, it overflowed in his eyes.

One cannot help thinking that this most
exemplary young lawyer must have been
amongst the good who die young. He is
the type of young lawyer who could not have
failed to be a bore, and we are not surprised
that the portrait goes on to say :

He piqued himself on understanding the practice of
the Courts, and in private company he took pleasure in
laying down the law..

Perhaps human nature is perverse, but I
fear this is not the type of lawyer the public
craves to see represented on the stage or
presented to them in the pages of fiction, and
it is not surprising that " Sir Launcelot
Greaves" was Smollett's least successful novel.
His lawyers, however, were not all impossibly
good like Mr. Tom Clarke. In " Ferdinand,

and the Law 1 1

Count Fathom," we meet a different type of
attorney. His fortune was made — as has
happened before and since — by special
ingenuity in the construction of bills of costs,
and one cannot but sympathise with his luck-
less client who found that his lawyer's bill
included 350 consultation fees in the course
of a year of only 365 days including Sundays.
But this attorney also deserves our sympathy,
for Count Fathom's mode of paying his
lawyer's bill was to split the poor attorney's
head with a poker, and when remonstrated
with by the doctor — who took a grave view
of the possible result of his violence — his
reply is significant of the estimation in
which, in Smollett's day, the attorney was
held.

I am not so unacquainted with the resistance of an
attorney's skull as to believe the chastisement I have
Inflicted upon him will at all endanger his life, which is
in much greater danger from the hands of the common
executioner.

12 Charles Dickens

Fielding had no exalted opinion of the
solicitors of his day, although, as a member
of the bar, he must have looked to them for
briefs. His opinion is quaintly expressed in
his left-handed compliment to Mr. Dowling,
the attorney in "Tom Jones," of whom it is
quaintly remarked that "he had not divested
himself of humanity in being an attorney."

In " Man and Wife " Wilkie Collins pre-
sents two colourless solicitors described as
belonging to —

That large class of purely mechanical and perfectly
mediocre persons connected with the practice of the law,
who will probably, in a more advanced state of society,
be superseded by machinery.

This description of the colourless type of
lawyer is, in suggestiveness, worthy of
Dickens himself

Perhaps the most optimistic view of the
lawyer in modern fiction is that in Sir
Walter Besant's legal novel "The Ivory

and the Law i 3

Gate," a book which contains quite a number
of legal characters, and not a bad one
amongst them. His portrait of a solicitor
is in refreshing contrast to some of those
I have quoted.

The solicitor is always engaged in considering how
best to guide his fellow-man through the labyrinthine
world. He receives his fellow-man at his entrance into
life as a ward ; he receives him grown up as a client ;
he advises him all his life, at every step, and in every
emergency. If the chent goes into partnership, or
marries, or buys a house, or builds one, or gets into
trouble, the solicitor advises and assists him. When
the client grows old, the solicitor makes his will. When
the client dies, the solicitor becomes executor and his
trustee, and administers his estate. It is thus a life
spent entirely for other people. I know not of any other
profession, unless it be medicine, that so much can be
said of. And think what terrors, what anxieties, what
disappointments the soHcitor witnesses and alleviates.
Think of the family scandals he hushes up and keeps
secret. Good Heavens ! if a solicitor in large practice
were to tell what he knows, think of the terrible
disclosures ! He knows everything. He knows more
tnan a Roman Catholic priest, because his penitents not
only reveal their own sins, but also those of their wives,
and sons, and friends, and partners.

14 Charles Dickens

This humorously sarcastic picture strikes
just the note which explains the frequent use
of the lawyer on the stage and in fiction.
The many-sidedness of the profession of the
law lends itself to the most varied treatment.
Nothing in the way of knowledge (especially
knowledge of so-called secrets) is so deep,
and nothing in the way of behaviour is so
eccentric, but a lawyer can be made to fit
the part, and so it is not surprising that the
pages of fiction teem with lawyers, and that
no melodrama is complete without a stage
lawyer in rusty black.

Perhaps the most lovable of all lawyers in
fiction are those in Thackeray's "Pendennis ";
and in " Philip " he presents us in Mr. Bond,
of Bond & Selby, with a unique type
of lawyer who had the courage to quarrel
with his best client.

In " Perlycross " Mr. Blackmore presents
Mr. Webber, a family solicitor, who was

and the Law 1 5

" no time server, only bound by his duty to
the firm and his sense of loyal service to a
client."

In "Thicker than Water" Mr. James
Payn introduces a solicitor with a high
sense of honour and no small amount of
professional courage, who, to his own loss,
sacrificed a client for whom he refused to
make a will which was palpably unjust ; but
he had this satisfaction, that the will, being-
executed by a rival solicitor, was afterwards
found to be invalid.

In " The Castle Inn " of Mr. Stanley Wey-
man Mr. Peter Fishwick is another example
in fiction of the poor but honest attorney.

Instances might be multiplied indefinitely
of novels in which the law and the
lawyer play a part, I had almost said in
which the law is dragged in and the lawyer
is made to act a part, for in a vast number of
instances the novelist's ideas about what the

1 6 Charles Dickens

law is are exceedingly amusing. Plots are
evolved out of legal situations which could
never occur, and lawyers are represented as
saying and doing things which no sane
lawyer in real life would ever dream of
saying or doing. It has often struck me
that some young lawyer with time on his
hands might do his profession a service, and
amuse the public, by compiling a volume
of extracts from popular novels setting
forth the law as expressed in the novels,
and in a parallel column the law as
it really is. Often the law is regarded
as a subject with which the novelist
may take a wide licence and may present
legal principles and legal practices, not
as they really exist, but as the exigencies
of the tale, and the evolution of the
plot, require. I do not suppose anybody
wants a serious view of the law presented in
the pages of a novel, for the law student

and the Law 1 7

does not go there for his legal principles, or
to inform himself of the correct practice of
the Courts ; and the real view of the law, as
applied to the circumstances created by the
novelist, would very often be sordid and
uninteresting, whilst imaginative law, in
the hands of a clever writer, can be made
interesting, and sometimes even exciting.

After all, the view of the law which so
often prevails in fiction is true to human
experience, for the bulk of humanity —
especially that portion of it which has
escaped falling into the toils of the law as a
personal experience — looks at the matter
broadly and regards the profession col-
lectively. It is not uncommon in every-
day life to hear disparaging comment
on the legal profession, made by people
who, if caught up sharply, and pinned down
to give a concrete instance of what they talk
vaguely about as the sharp practices of

1 8 Charles Dickens

lawyers, are, to their own surprise perhaps,
obHged to admit that the individual lawyers
they do happen to know personally, do not at
all answer to their general idea of the class.
On the stage, and in the pages of fiction, a
lawyer is very seldom what is called a
"popular" character. The stage lawyer is
often the villain of the piece. Seldom is he
presented as a benefactor, or a model of
virtuous honesty, or the champion of the
oppressed, or the exponent of the truth.
Such a stage lawyer would probably be
condemned as unreal by the critical playgoer.
And yet, is it not, in real life, the case that
the high-souled lawyer is a real personage, as
many have (perhaps to their own surprise)
discovered in their time of stress and mis-
fortune? In one of his books Anthony
Trollope aptly says :

Is it not remarkable that the common repute which
we all give to attorneys in general is exactly opposite to

and the Law 19

that which every man gives to his own attorney in
particular ? Whom does anybody trust so imphcitly as
he trusts his own attorney, and yet is it not the case that
the body of attorneys is supposed to be the most roguish
body in existence ?

But if the lawyer has been unjustly
maligned in literature, he may console him-
self that he is not alone. The other
professions have suffered in the same way.
As regards the Church, is not fiction full of
pictures of the lazy and the hypocritical
parson ? As regards medicine, have not
doctors been brutally caricatured as quacks
who " thrust drugs of which they know little
into bodies of which they know less"?
And is not such criticism the outcome of the
same baneful tendency to generalise, and
subject to the same curious anomaly, that the
critic who indulges in the cheap sneer at the
body, is often the earnest believer in the
individual ? Outside of the professions the
same mis-description prevails in literature.

2 Charles Dickens

Are not many novels built upon imaginary
mercantile transactions which, as the business
world is constituted, would be simply
impossible in real life, and have not
merchants and traders and others been
traduced for the purposes of sensational
fiction? Dr. Johnson's crabbed definition of
a stockbroker as " a low wretch who gets his
money by buying and selling shares in the
funds," is as much out of harmony with the
truth as are many imaginary definitions in
fiction of the parson, or the doctor, or the
lawyer.

But I am at present more particularly
concerned only with Dickens' attitude
towards the law, and with the lawyer as
painted by Dickens. His method is not the
common one of unreasoning denunciation of
a class. He knew better than to represent
all lawyers as rogues, for he had the
advantage of knowing the legal profession

and the Law 2 1

from the inside. He never lays down bad
law, and he never credits a member of the
legal profession with impossible professional
conduct.

But even Dickens could not divest himself
of the common habit of allowing personal
experience to colour his views. The plunger
who, in his haste to be rich, stakes and loses
on the Stock Exchange, immediately pro-
ceeds to revile his stockbroker, whose only
interest in the business was the earning of a
modest commission. Smarting under the
loss of money in an unfortunate speculation,
the client is ready to adopt Dr. Johnson's
definition of a stockbroker. So also the man
who is unfortunate in his appeal to the law
is often too ready to say with Mr. Bumble,
the parochial beadle in "Oliver Twist," that
"the law is a ass — a idiot." Every lawyer
knows only too well that the layman
is too apt to form his opinions of the

2 2 Charles Dickens

law generally according as the law has been
kind or has been cruel to him personally ;
and so, in regarding the legal scenes and
characters in Dickens' works, it is useful
always to bear in mind that Dickens didjiot
love the law. Nor was his resentment a
passing phase. His hatred of the Court of
Chancery began with his own experience as
a suitor. He was involved in a Chancery
lawsuit over the piracy of his " Christmas
Carol" and "Martin Chuzzlewit." He was
entirely successful, for the lawsuit resulted in
the pirates making a public apology. The
judgment of the Court also found them liable
in costs, but unfortunately the costs were
not recovered, and Dickens had the not
uncommon experience of securing a victory
at law, but having himself to pay for it. In
the first blush of his victory he wrote
exuberandy :

The pirates are beaten flat. They are bruised,

and the Law 23

bloody, battered, smashed, squelched, and utterly
undone.

But when his bill of costs came in, and

the pirates went insolvent, and could not pay,

his exuberance was modified. There is

nothing so effective in modifying exuberant

jollity as a lawyer's bill. Dickens — like

many another litigant — visited upon the

Court the sins of the opposing litigant. It

was not the fault of the Court that the

pirates could not pay the costs, but Dickens

counted it against the Court nevertheless,

and when, within a couple of years, he again

experienced piracy, he preferred to bear the

ills he had rather than fly to others that, as

regards the attendant cost, he knew not of.

Once bitten, twice shy. He declined again

to resort to the law, and wrote thus bitterly

of his former experience :

I shall not easily forget the expense, and anxiety,
and horrible injustice of the " Carol " case.

24 Charles Dickens

Strong language is excusable on the part

of a litigant who fights a lawsuit and loses it,

and has to pay for the losing of it. Still

stronger excuse is there for the ire of the

man who fights a lawsuit, and gains it, and

has to pay the costs of gaining it. But what

may seem at the time injustice and anxiety

are forgettable elements. Even the expense

in time the average suitor can forget. But

Dickens never forgot. This early experience

coloured not only his opinion of the Chancery

Court, but his opinion of the law generally.

Thirty years later, in a private letter — and

that, too, a letter to a lady — he wrote :

I have that high opinion of the law of England
generally which one is likely to derive from the impression
that it puts all the honest men under the diabolical
hoofs of all the scoundrels. It makes me cautious of
doing right — an admirable instance of its wisdom.

This sweeping sarcastic comment indicates

that his attitude towards the whole judicial

system was hostile, and, I venture to think,

and the Law 2^

somewhat unreasonable. That there were
abuses in his day, as there are in the present
day, goes without saying. No system of law
is incapable of abuse. In all his works
Dickens no doubt aimed at calling public
attention to abuses, with the hope of their
being remedied, and in this instance, as in
others, that aim was good. But even the
greatest men are at times small, and, in this
matter, it seems very plain that he was in
such a novel as " Bleak House" working off
his personal hatred of the Chancery Court of
England, as well as showing up the abuses
to which the practice of that Court lent
itself.

The greatest novel of the law which
Dickens produced — the most effective tale of
the law, I think, ever written — was "Bleak
House." It begins and ends in the Court
of Chancery, and there is — from beginning
to end of the long tale — not a single

2 6 Charles Dickens

character who can be said to be outside of
the influence of the dominating legal element.
In some of his other books the law plays an
important part, but it only plays a part.
There are other parts to play, and other
interests to introduce. But in " Bleak
House " the atmosphere of the law prevails
throughout. Judges and Chancery Court
officials, barristers, solicitors, law clerks, law
stationers, detectives and police inspectors,
litigants, singly or in groups, always occupy
the stage, and every incident of the tale has
a legal environment. Perhaps this very fact
explains why " Bleak House," although, as I
at least think, the most powerful sustained
effort which Dickens made, is not his most
popular novel. The legal characters are
perhaps more subtly drawn, but they do not
stand out of the canvas in the same way as,
for instance, the popular legal characters in
the " Pickwick Papers." To the experienced

and the Law 27

lawyer there is a very subtle humour in the
interminable arguments of the Chancery
barristers in the suit upon which the tale in
" Bleak House" is built; but the humour is
often missed by the lay reader, who more
readily understands the lawyers of the " Pick-
wick Papers." The deferential Chancery
solicitors of "Bleak House" are, from a
professional point of view, perhaps more
interesting studies of legal character than
bustling practitioners like Perker, or Dodson
& Fogg of " Pickwick." But to the
general reader they do not appeal. Mr.
Tangle, K.C., and Kenge & Carboy, the
Chancery solicitors of " Bleak House,"
will never grip the public imagination like
Sergeant Buzfuz and Dodson & Fogg
of " Pickwick." All that he knew of the
law and of the Law Courts Dickens put into
" Bleak House." The plot itself is not an
original one in its inception, but its develop-

2 8 Charles Dickens

ment and its finish are new. Many law-
suits have been described in the pages
of fiction, but never one like /ariidyce
and Jarndyce, the Chancery suit which
in the opening chapter is described as
"that scarecrow of a suit which has in
course of time become so complicated
that no man alive knows what it means.''
This lawsuit drove some of the parties to
it into their graves, and others into lunatic
asylums ; and in the end fittingly died of
inanition, the whole estate which was the
subject of the litigation having melted .away
in costs.

I think that Dickens was too hard upon
the Chancery Court. As I have said, his
vision of it was coloured by his own
unfortunate experience. But the moral of
" Bleak House," nevertheless, was not un-
needed — although morals, where most needed,
not infrequently are most unheeded. The

and the Law 29

law's delay is an old grievance, and it is
to be feared that no system of legal
procedure can ever entirely avoid that. But
the methods of all British Courts of law
have vastly improved since Dickens' day, and
the improvements in Chancery Court practice
probably owe more than its officials would
care to admit to the exposure of the judicial
methods which Dickens made in " Bleak
House." In his enthusiasm for reform, how-
ever, Dickens forgot that if there were no
litigants there would be no lawsuits, and that
Courts of law are very often what litigants
make them. It is a common experience
that illustrated so gloomily throughout this
book — the effort of a litigant to extract for
himself something out of a lawsuit which he
would have been well advised never to have
entered upon, and then, when his efforts have
resulted in nothing, the tendency of the
litigant, not to blame himself for entering

30 Charles Dickens

upon a wild-goose chase, but rather to
blame the judge, or the Court system, or
his own lawyers, or the opposing lawyers,
or anything, or anybody, other than
himself.

The picture of the Court of Chancery upon
a foggy November day, with which " Bleak
House " opens, has never been equalled as a
setting of judicial environment. The descrip-
tions of Courts in novels are often as
imaginative as the law in them.

Dickens knew the Courts too well to fall
into the common error of laying his Court
scenes in a false setting. In his early
days he had opportunities of studying the
solemnities of the law, first, as a youth
in the office of Messrs. Ellis & Blackmore,
later, as a junior law clerk in the office
of Mr. Molloy, of 6 Symonds' Inn, who
was the prototype of Mr. Vholes, the
solicitor for Richard Carstone in the " Bleak

and the Law 3 i

House " Chancery suit, and later still as a
shorthand Court reporter. He had himself
also at one time the idea of becoming a
barrister, and actually kept a few terms in one
of the Inns of Court, but he abandoned the
legal profession for that of literature. Dickens
also had many lawyer friends, and numbered
amongst his intimates such men as Talfourd,
Denman, Campbell, and Hawkins.

In daily association with the judicial solem-
nities, it was impossible for him, even when
setting out to caricature the Chancery Court
system, to present other than a realistic picture
of the Chancery Court itself. In all Dickens'
writings I know of nothing which better
illustrates that natural capacity of his for
absorbing small details, which is the great
charm of his descriptions of places and
people, than the brief description of the
Chancery Court in the opening chapter of
"Bleak House." The Court itself, "dim

3 2 Charles Dickens

with wasting candles here and there," the
Lord Chancellor on the bench, " with a
foggy glory round his head softly fenced
in with crimson cloth and curtains." This
judge, and Justice Starleigh, who presided
at the Pickwick trial, are Dickens' two
contrast pictures of the bench. The Lord
Chancellor in " Bleak House " is always
courteous and polished, and betrays nothing
of the boredom which the case oi Jarndyce
mid Jarndyce was bound to inflict. He is
courteous to Mr. Tangle, K.C., the "large
advocate with great whiskers and a little
voice." He is courteous also to " a very little
counsel with a terrific bass voice, who arises
fully inflated in the back settlements of the
fog." Still more courteous is the Lord
Chancellor receiving the two young wards
in his own room. To this judge Dickens
has as kindly a leaning as he, by contrast,
had an unkindly feeling to Justice Starleigh.

and the Law 33

In his Court, and about this judge, the
atmosphere of diginity which surrounds the
Chancellor is altogether absent.

Mr. Justice Starleigh was a most particularly short
man, and so fat that he seemed all face and waistcoat.
He rolled in upon two little turned legs, and having
bobbed gravely to the bar, who bobbed gravely to him,
put his little legs underneath his table, and his little
three-cornered hat upon it, and when Mr. Justice
Starleigh had done this, all you could see of him was two
queer little eyes, one broad pink face, and somewhere
about half of a very big and very comical-looking wig.

Speaking of judges generally in his
" American Notes," Dickens voices a very
common idea of Courts of law. Many
people can never dissociate the idea of stage
effect from a Court. These people regard a
Court as a set scene, in which every one has
a set part to take ; and perhaps in a sense
they are not far wrong, for there is an
absence of individualism about a law Court.
For the time being the barrister is not him-

34 Charles Dickens

self, but his client, lookinor at thinos from the
client's point of view ; for the time being the
judge is not an individual with personal
opinions, but is the embodiment of the law,
for the making of which he is not responsible,
but only for its application. In the
"American Notes" Dickens makes this
quaint remark :

There is undoubtedly a degree of protection in the wig
and gown, a dismissal of individual responsibility in
dressing for the part.

To Dickens himself, the irascible little
judge whom he created to preside at the trial of
Bardell v. Pickwick had a special fascination.
Justice Starleigh was one of his own creations
whom he loved to impersonate. In that
recently-published delightful book by R. C.
Lehmann. entitled " Memories of Half a
Century," there is described a reading given
by Dickens of the Pickwick trial scene, in
the course of which Mr. Lehmann says :

and the Law 35

I shall never forget my amazement when Dickens
assumed the character of Mr. Justice Starleigh. The
face and figure that I knew, that I had seen on the stage
a moment before, seemed to vanish as if by magic, and
there appeared instead a fat, pompous, pursy little man
with a plump imbecile face from which every vestige of
good temper and cheerfulness, everything, in fact, except
an expression of self-sufficient stupidity, had been
removed. The upper lip had become long, the corners of
the mouth drooped, the nose was short and podgy, all the
angles of the chin had gone, the chin itself had receded
into the throat, and the eyes, lately so humorous and
human, had become as malicious and obstinate as those
of a pig. It was a marvellous effect in transformation.

Nevertheless, Justice Starleigh is the familiar
friend of every Dickens reader, whilst the
polished Lord Chancellor lives in the recol-
lection of but few.

Of the three leading solicitors of " Bleak
House," two are of a somewhat characterless
type. They are both in Chancery practice,
which does not seem to lend itself to any
great individuality of character. " Conver-
sation Kenge," as he was called, of the firm

36 Charles Dickens

of Kenge & Carboy, the solicitors for Mr.
Jarndyce, is but a more successful and
therefore a more cheerful edition of the
melancholy Mr. Vholes, the solicitor for
Richard Carstone. In Dickens' books the
names of his characters are often full of
significance. Mr. Vholes is an instance of
that, a " vole " in a card orame meaning" a
deal where all the winning cards fall to the
dealer. It was in "Bleak House" that
Dickens said, "The one great principle of
the English law is to make business for
itself." Solicitors created upon this low
estimate of their profession, could not well
be particularly interesting. The Chancery
solicitors of "Bleak House" are none of
them very lovable characters. They are too
respectable and too commonplace. Take,
for instance, the portrait of Mr. Vholes.

Mr. Vholes is a very respectable man. He has not a
very large business, but he is a very respectable man.

and the Law 37

He is allowed by the greater attorneys who have made
good fortunes, or are making them, to be a most
respectable man. He never misses a chance in his
practice, which is a mark of respectability; he never
takes any pleasure, which is another mark of respecta-
bility ; he is reserved and serious, which is also a mark
of respectability; his digestion is impaired, which is
highly respectable ; he is making hay of the grass which
is flesh, for his three daughters and his father are
dependent on him in the Vale of Taunton.

The third leading solicitor of " Bleak
House" is a very marked contrast to the
other two. There is nothing commonplace
about Mr. Tulkinghorn, the family solicitor
of Sir Leicester Dedlock, and the confi-
dential depositary of the secrets of the great.
Mr. Tulkinghorn of Lincoln's Inn Fields is,
in my opinion, by far the most finished
creation amongst all the Dickens lawyers.
This lawyer tersely, but comprehensively,
defined as "an oyster of the old school
whom nobody can open," combines an
old-school courtesy with the ferreting

3 8 Charles Dickens

proclivities of a Scotland Yard detec-
tive. From the time he appears at old
Crooks' rag store, in search of information
about the poverty-stricken law writer, till his
dramatic end by being shot, the action of the
story turns upon him even more than upon
the Chancery suit itself

In " Bleak House," lower down in the
professional scale, we find a greater wealth
of character than amongst the barristers or-
attorneys, and, in real human interest, none
of the legal characters approaches to " the
young man of the name of Guppy," the law
clerk of Kenge & Carboy. As a study in
law life he is most interesting. He first
appears when sent by Mr. Kenge to meet
the Chancery wards, and he is introduced
in a few brief words, descriptive of the
office boy of all time — "a young gendeman
who had inked himself by accident."
He rapidly developed under the influence

and the Law 39

of these "chords in the human heart " which
it was his gloomy delight to strike. His
proposal of marriage to Miss Summerson,
" without prejudice," is in the best vein of
Dickens humour.

We read in the Life of Dickens how
vividly he realised the characters he was
creatino- — how he laucrhed aloud as the comic
creations grew under his pen — how he wept
as he chronicled sadness. I often think with
what delight he must have painted the por-
trait of " the young man of the name of
Guppy." Dickens could enter into the
feelings of just such a young man, for he had
himself been a young law clerk, and he had
a real love for the law clerk who figures in
so many of his books, and of whom he had
never an unkind word to say.

There are several grades of lawyer's clerks. There
is the articled clerk who has paid a premium, and
is an attorney in perspective, who runs a tailor's bill,

40 Charles Dickens

receives invitations to parties, knows a family in Gower
Street and another in Tavistock Square, who goes out of
town every long vacation to see his father who keeps
innumerable horses, and who is, in short, the very
aristocrat of clerks.

When David Copperfield was articled to
Spenlow & Jorkins, his aunt, Betsy Trot-
wood, had to put down a premium of
^looo for him, and he got no salary.

Then there is the salaried clerk — out-of-door or
indoor as the case may be — who devotes the major part
of his thirty shillings a week to his personal pleasure and
adornments, repairs half-price to the Adelphi Theatre at
least three times a week, dissipates majestically at the
cider cellars afterwards, and is a dirty caricature of the
fashion which expired six months ago. Then there is
the middle-aged copying clerk who is always shabby and
often drunk, and there are the office lads in their iirst
surtouts, who feel a befitting contempt for boys at day
schools, club as they go home at night for saveloys and
porter, and think there's nothing like life.

" The young man of the name of Guppy "
belong^ed to the better class of salaried clerk,

and the Law 41

but he had ambition beyond that sphere, and
he was appreciated by his employers, for we
find him, in the closing chapter of the book,
able to represent to Miss Summerson in
pressing his suit that he had now been
presented with his articles by Kenge &
Carboy, and so was on the first rung of the
ladder towards being a Chancery practitioner.
The "chords in the human heart" are the
attributes of " the young man of the name of
Guppy " which the general reader of " Bleak
House" mostly recollects. But his love
story was only one side of Mr. Guppy — not
all of him, and other and suggestive aspects
of his nature are disclosed by such episodes
as the way he stood by his friend Tony
Jobling, who had gone down hill, the part
he took in unearthing the secret of Lady
Dedlock and Miss Summerson, his devotion
to Miss Summerson, at whose request he
desisted from investigating the clue he had,

42 Charles Dickens

and his kindness to and firm belief in his
mother. I am persuaded that Charles
Dickens intended " the young man of the
name of Guppy " to go down to posterity a
type in his own sphere of one of Nature's
gentlemen, who, as a law clerk, was faithful
to his employer's interests, and also ambi-
tious for his own advancement in the
profession ; who, as a lover, was constant to
" the image enshrined upon his heart," and
who in general was an all-round good
fellow.

In "Bleak House" the law takes on a
sombre aspect, but in the " Pickwick Papers "
the whole legal aspect is cheerful. None
of the lawyers there is tinged with melan-
choly. They are all of the lively and
cheerful sort. Take Perker, for instance,
Mr. Pickwick's own legal adviser —

A little high-dried man with a dark squeezed-up face
and small restless black eyes, that kept winking and

and the Law ^3

twinkling on each side of his little inquisitive nose, as if
they were playing a perpetual game of peep-bo
with that feature. He was dressed all in black, with
boots as shiny as his eyes, a low white neckcloth and a
clean shirt with a frill to it. A gold watch chain and
seals depended from his fob. He carried his black kid
gloves in his hands, not on them, and as he spoke,
thrust his wrists beneath his coat-tails with the air of a
man who was in the habit of propounding some regular
posers.

Is not Perker the familiar type of the
self-confident, but not brilliant, legal adviser,
who is as well known in legal circles now
as then ? But before Dodson & Fogg
Perker pales in legal interest. Although
Dickens' only contribution to the literature
of the law had been his creation of
Dodson & Fogg, he would have taken a
first place as the portrayer of legal character.
The hold upon the public imagination which
this firm has acquired is wonderful. An
illustration of this realism occurred not very
long ago, when a jury awarded to a solicitor

44 Charles Dickens

damages against a client who had called him
"a regular Dodson & Fogg."

From the lawyer's point of view one
is tempted to inquire whether, after all,
the commonly accepted view of Dodson
& Fogg is warranted. They have been
held up to ignominy as unscrupulous petti-
foggers, and they will probably continue to
be so regarded. But a lawyer does not
create the facts of a case. He gets them
from his client, and Mrs. Bardell's case was
undoubtedly, as put before her solicitors, a
good jury case. It is a striking thing that
the evidence upon which she got a
verdict was entirely the evidence of Mr.
Pickwick's own friends. Mr. Winkle, Mr.
Tupman, and Mr. Snodgrass were all what
lawyers call "hostile witnesses." So was
Sam Weller. The jury, of course, knew
that they were the defendant's own friends,
and no kind of evidence so tells with a jury

and the Law ^^

as admissions wrung in cross-examination
from a reluctant friend witness. In a case
of the sort, what damaging admissions these
friends had to make ! Dodson & Foo-o-
were acute practitioners who astutely re-
frained from overdoing their case. They
contented themselves with proving their case
out of the mouths of Mr. Pickwick's own
friends. It was not buttressed by what we
call collateral evidence. Mr. Pickwick's
experiences would not have been difficult
to trace. What if Dodson & Fogg
had, for instance, called his friend Mr.
Wardle and others to speak to Mr. Pick-
wick's general behavour ? Of course we
know that the kissing of ladies, old and
young, and being kissed by them, was all
part of the general jollity at the hospitable
Wardle's country home. Of course we all
know that there was nothing but benevolent
intention in Mr. Pickwick's being found at

46 Charles Dickens

midnight in the grounds of a young ladies'
boarding school. Of course we know that it
was entirely owing to a geographical error
that Mr. Pickwick found himself in a lady's
bedroom in the hotel at Ipswich. But the
jury did not know all this, and such circum-
stances would have been quite relevant to
make out a general character for frivolity
and gallantry against the unfortunate
Pickwick. The general character of the
defendant is a not unimportant element in
such cases, and Dodson & Fogg might
have disclosed much more than they
did to influence a jury. That they did not
attempt this certainly stamps them as
experienced lawyers, who knew when they
had a good case in brief compass, and so
refrained from making the very common
error of overlaying such a case, with the
possible result of strangling it. Then, in
such cases, the demeanour of the parties is

and the Law ^y

always an element with the jury. A view of
the plaintiff commonly entertained is that
she was a fat and by no means attractive
elderly female, but the well-known picture by
Browne of Mrs. Bardell fainting away and
being discovered in Mr. Pickwick's arms by
his three friends represents her as a plump
and comely widow, and it is quite likely that
at the trial the personal appearance of the
distressed plaintiff had its due weight with
the jury. If she had not been comely
Dodson & Fogg were certainly too astute to
have presented her in Court. There was
ample evidence to support the verdict of the
jury. If it had not been so, Perker would
no doubt have applied for a new trial. But he
recognised that the evidence was sufficient,
for he accepted the verdict.

Dickens wrote before the days when it
was competent to examine the parties in
their own suits. In present-day practice,

48 Charles Dickens

the leading features of a breach of promise
suit are the examination of the fair plaintiff,
and the cross-examination of the perturbed
defendant. What a pity that was not
permissible in Dickens' day. What cross-
examination Mr. Pickwick would have been
subjected to by Serjeant Buzfuz, and
how Pickwick would have lost his temper
and given his case away. But Dickens
was too loyal to the law to put Mr.
Pickwick into the witness-box in the
book, when he could not have done so in
the Court itself. He contented himself
with putting into the speech of Serjeant
Buzfuz the points which could, with telling
effect, have been made the basis of a cross-
examination scene.

There seems therefore nothing out of the
ordinary course as regards the conduct of the
trial. The subsequent behaviour of Dodson
& Fogg was in accordance with the ideas of

and the Law 49

the time. Of course, looking at it from our
twentieth-century point of view, it may
appear monstrous that Mr. Pickwick should
have been incarcerated because he refused
to implement the jury's verdict, and possibly
still more monstrous that Mrs. Bardell also
should have found herself in the Fleet
because she would not pay Dodson & Fogg's
costs. But we have to recollect that, in
Dickens' day, a debtor who failed to pay his
debt could, as the law expressed it, have his
person taken in execution. Even at the
present time people are sent to prison
every day because they will not pay certain
kinds of debt. No doubt the incarceration
of a debtor who is unable to pay his creditor
is always hard. But no such element existed
in Mr. Pickwick's case. Upon the verdict
of the jury the Court had adjudged him
debtor to Mrs. Bardell for the damages
awarded, and debtor to Dodson & Fogg

50 Charles Dickens

for their costs. Mr. Pickwick was quite
able to pay, and it was, accordingly, Dod-
son & Fogg's professional duty to their
client to recover her damages, and their duty
to themselves to recover their costs. To
effect this they were doing no more than the
law permitted when they put Mr. Pickwick —
and ultimately Mrs. Bardell herself — into the
Fleet. Their anxiety to recover their costs
the general reader does not appreciate, and
perhaps Dickens' own experience of law
costs in the piracy case before referred to,
which rankled in his mind, may have led
him unconsciously to unduly emphasise the
element of the costs, and to forget that, after
all, a lawyer's bill is a debt just as much as a
tailor's bill.

It is a tendency of lay human nature to
regard a lawyer's bill as somehow different
from any other kind of debt. There are
some people who have an idea that a lawyer

and the Law 5 1

should be the benefactor, as well as the
adviser, of his client, that when a litigation
has been lost, for instance, the lawyer
should not press for his costs, and that at
any rate there is never any hurry for
paying a lawyer's bill. The prevalence
of ideas of that sort, and the popular
suspicion of the law entertained by so
large a proportion of humanity, probably
explain why Dodson & Fogg have, in
the public mind, became synonymous with
chicanery and harsh dealing ; but upon a
fair and impartial weighing of their recorded
sayings and doings there may be room for
some doubt as to whether they have not
been unjustly vilified.

I have always wondered whether Dickens
himself ever contemplated that Dodson &
Fogg would come to be associated in the
public mind with all that is mean and tricky
in the practice of the law. I am inclined to

52 Charles Dickens

think that he did not, and that he really had in
his mind a much broader aim than merely to
pillory the speculative lawyer, who has existed
in all time, and exists to-day, and is not with-
out his uses in the legal world. The history
of the famous lawsuit of Bardell v. Pickwick
was, I think, intended to be taken as a whole,
and, so regarded, it is a delightful piece of
satire upon the laws of evidence and the
practice of trial by jury. It sometimes
happens that a particular incident or a par-
ticular character in a tale takes such a hold
upon the public mind that the author's broader
aim is lost sight of, and it is possibly so in
this instance. Dodson & Fogg so catch the
fancy that some readers never get past them,
and forget that there were other characters
and other elements in the little drama, and
so they miss the delicate satire of this episode
in the genial Pickwick's career. Incidentally,
the author no doubt intended to condemn the

and the Law 53

conduct of litigation upon a speculative basis,
and also to illustrate how, in the hands of
clever lawyers, incidents, trifling and inno-
cent in themselves, may be made to appear
fraught with deep meaning, and be presented to
a credulous, and possibly not over-intelligent,
jury as what lawyers call "circumstantial
evidence." But these were only incidents.
The broad aim of the author was to present
an object-lesson designed to cast ridicule
upon that legal system which he so much
detested, and which he never missed an
opportunity of holding up to scorn.

There is yet another lawyer in " Pickwick
Papers" who deserves special mention, for he
is of a type quite distinct from either Kenge
& Carboy or Dodson & Fogg. Solomon
Pell was of the fraternity known as bar-
pariour lawyers, who practised in the
Insolvent Court, now abolished as a separate
institution and merged in the Bankruptcy

54 Charles Dickens

Court. These parlour lawyers Dickens
thus described :

The professional establishment of the more opulent of
these gentlemen consists of a blue bag and a boy. They
have no fixed ofifices, their legal business being transacted
in the parlours of public-houses or the yards of prisons.

Mr. Solomon Pell had two of the essential
elements which make for success in the law —
he had perfect confidence in himself, and he
had the art of inspiring confidence in his clients.
One of his clients was Mr. Weller, senior,
who first met him over obtaining the
discharge of a friend of the road "who had
contracted a speculative but improvident
passion for horsing long stages, which had
led to his present embarrassments." Mr.
Pell had then so impressed Mr. Weller
that, when he and Sam conceived the idea
of having Sam arrested for debt, so that
he might go into the Fleet to be near Mr.
Pickwick, Mr. Weller at once resorted to

and the Law 55

Mr. Pell, whom he thus described to Sam :
" A limb o' the law, Sammy, as has got
brains like the frogs, dispersed all over his
body, and reachin' to the very tips of his
fingers. "

Mr. Pell was fortunate in retaining this
client's confidence for all kinds of business,
for after Sam had made his father understand
that legal formalities were required to prove
the late Mrs. Weller's will, Mr. Weller had
no hesitation about the selection of his
lawyer : " Pell must look into this, Sammy.
He's the man for a difficult question of law."
And this piece of business being satisfactorily
disposed of, Mr. Weller and his professional
adviser parted with mutual regard, their
farewell, like their introduction, being made
in the bar-parlour, and their confidence
in each other remaining unshaken. Mr.
Solomon Pell, like all the lawyers of
" Pickwick," took a cheerful view of life,

56 Charles Dickens

although the phase of it which came
particularly under his notice did not inspire
cheerfulness. But ingress and exit at the
Fleet required the aid of the law. Insolvent
debtors were not particular as to the
personality of their lawyers, and till the
Fleet was closed these bar-parlour lawyers
were a necessary evil, and, in their own
sphere, perhaps, served their clients as use-
fully as more exalted practitioners in the
more savoury regions of legal practice.

In "Great Expectations" we make the
acquaintance of a different phase of the law,
and of two of the best of Dickens' legal
creations — Mr. J aggers and his clerk, the
cheerful Mr. Wemmick. Of every other
lawyer in the Dickens collection we have
a personal description ; of Mr. Jaggers we
have none, and yet his personality is vivid.
No reader of " Great Expectations " can rise
from its perusal without feeling that this

and the Law 57

character, in regard to whom the fewest words
are said, is yet the outstanding personality of
the tale. When he first appears upon the
scene, visiting Pip to tell him of his good
fortune, Mr. J aggers thus tersely introduces
himself, and in so doing reveals the man :

My name is Jaggers, and I am a lawyer in London.
I am pretty well knoivn.

Equally laconic, but quite expressive, is
Mr. Wemmick's description of his master :

Always seems to me as if he had set a man-trap and
was watching it. Suddenly — click — you're caught.

Upon Pip remarking that he supposed Mr.
Jaggers was a skilful lawyer — " Deep," said
Wemmick, "as Australia," pointing with
his pen at the office floor to express that
Australia was understood for the purpose
of the figure to be symmetrically on the
opposite spot of the globe. "If there was

58 Charles Dickens

anything deeper," added Wemmick, '' hed be
itr As to the methods of business of some
criminal lawyers, how a few words may
express much, is illustrated by the following
brief but suggestive conversation between
Mr. Jaggers and his tout Mike, the "gentle-
man with one eye, in a velveteen suit and
fur cap." This is the conversation :

"Oh," said Mr. Jaggers, turning to the man who was
pulling a lock of hair in the middle of his forehead, like
the bull in Cock Robin pulling at the bell rope, "your
man comes on this afternoon. Well ? " " Well, Master
Jaggers," returned Mike in the voice of a sufferer from
a constitutional cold, "arter a deal of trouble I found
one, sir, as might do." "What is he prepared to
swear ? " " Well, Master Jaggers," said Mike, wiping his
nose on his fur cap, " in a general way, anythink."

Pip's impression of Mr. Jaggers when he
went to see him in the Court is thus
recorded :

He had a woman under examination, or cross-
examination — I don't know which — and was striking her,
and the bench, and everybody, with awe. If anybody
of whosoever degree said a word that he didn't approve,

and the Law

59

he instantly required to have it taken down. If any-
body wouldn't make an admission, he said, " I'll have
it out of you," and if anybody made an admission, he said,
" Now I have got you." The magistrates shivered under
a single bite of his finger. Thieves and thief-takers hung
in dread rapture on his words, and shrank when a hair of
his eyebrows turned in their direction. Which side he was
on I couldn't make out, for he seemed to me to be
grinding the whole place in a mill.

Dickens had a wonderful power of inter-
preting impressions. This description exactly
personates the criminal lawyer. The man
who devotes himself exclusively to criminal
practice often acquires an Esau-like attitude
of mind. For the time his hand seems to be
against every man. He comes instinctively
to regard every adverse witness as a liar,
and about all great criminal lawyers there is
an indescribable quality which compels
attention, and inspires not only the con-
fidence of clients, but the fearing respect of
all regular frequenters of the criminal Courts.

Mr. Jaggers is not a pleasant character.

6o Charles Dickens

He was not meant to be. He was meant to
portray a special type of lawyer, better known
in London than elsewhere, for London is the
home of the specialised lawyer. And Mr.
Jaggers is the type of the Old Bailey
practitioner, the only one in all Dickens'
writings, and introduced, as I think, in this
book specially to represent this type, for the
tale did not necessarily require a criminal
lawyer ; for the purposes of the story any kind
of confidential lawyer would have sufficed.

In pleasing contrast to the hard and
sour Mr. Jaggers, who so markedly took
on the character of his surroundings, is his
genial confidential clerk Mr. Wemmick,
whom no surroundings influenced, whose
domestic pleasantries so contrasted with his
professional duties, with his toy of a house
at Walworth, "the Castle" which was the pride
of his deaf old father — "the aged P."
Wemmick is the Mark Tapley of the law.

and the Law 6i

The sordidness of his professional employ-
ment could not damp his spirits. He had
grasped the philosophy of the entire separation
of the professional and domestic side of life
when he said to Pip :

The office is one thing, and private Hfe is another :
when I go into the office, I leave the Castle behind me,
and when I come into the Castle, I leave the office
behind me.

To do just this is a most difficult thing
for a busy lawyer to do. But that it is
difficult to follow in practice does not make
Mr. Wemmick's philosophy of professional
life the less sound.

In " Our Mutual Friend " the law plays
little part. Mortimer Lightwood, no
doubt, was a lawyer, and so was his friend
Eugene Wrayburn. But their practice of
the law was but nominal, and their aim in
life was the pursuit of pleasure rather than
of guineas. They were, however, like all

62 Charles Dickens

the Dickens lawyers, typical of their class.
They represent the type of lawyer who
takes a legal qualification rather for its
social than its professional aspect, and there
is nothing about them of any distinct pro-
fessional character.

In "The Mystery of Edwin Drood" there
is only one lawyer, and he also is typical of
his class, that select class of the semi-retired
professional man who with a legal training
has drifted into a legal siding, and smothered
professional ambition.

Mr. Grewgious had been bred to the bar and had laid
himself out for chamber practice, to draw deeds — " ' con-
vey ' the wise it call," as Pistol says. But conveyancing
and he had made such a very indifferent marriage of it that
they separated by consent, if there can be said to be sepa-
ration where there had never been coming together. No,
coy conveyancing would not come to Mr. Grewgious.
She was wooed, not won, and they went their several
ways. But an arbitration being blown towards him by
some unaccountable wind, and he gaining great credit in
it, as one indefatigable in seeking out right, and doing
right, a pretty fat receivership was next blown into his

and the Law 63

pocket, by a wind more traceable to its source. So by
chance he had found his niche.

I always think of Grewgious as a
suspended Perker. Perhaps he never
had any great ambition to get on in his
profession. Many lawyers do lack a real
interest in their profession, and so they do
not advance in it. Mr. Grewgious was this
sort of lawyer, not to be called a failure
exactly, but rather a might-have-been. Of
course a comfortable appointment is a very
pleasant form in which to suffer professional
ambition to be smothered, and Mr. Grewgious
in his niche is a pleasing picture of content.
But he ceases to be interesting as a lawyer.
Dickens tersely sums him up thus :

He had snuffed out his ambition (supposing him to
have ever Ughted it) and had settled down with his
snuffers for the rest of his life.

There, as the lawyer, we leave Mr.
Grewgious. We are not here concerned

64 Charles Dickens

with him in his character of the kind-
hearted guardian of his ward Miss Rosa Bud,
and as acting the part of general peacemaker
in that turbulent tale of " Edwin Drood."

In " David Copperfield" there are several
lawyers, but there is very little law. The
nearest approach to a legal complication is
the exposure of the humble Uriah Heep by
Mr. Micawber, resulting in the recovery of
Miss Betsy Trotwood's property, and the
relief of the embarrassments of Mr. Wickfield,
that genial and lovable specimen of the
country solicitor, so very different from the
Chancery lawyers of " Bleak House" or the
sharp practitioners of " Pickwick." The
weakness of old Mr. Wickfield, taken by
itself, might seem contemptible, but in the
hands of the master portrayer of character
it is artistic, for Mr. Wickfield's facility was
the necessary foil to Uriah Heep's roguery,
just as the complications which resulted gave

and the Law 65

the opportunity to the unselfish and good-
natured Tommy Traddles to right the wrongs
of everybody all round. Mr. Traddles is
probably the outcome of Dickens' own
short attempt at keeping terms. He was in
the life long enough to perceive the hard
struggle which lies before the barrister without
influence and connection ; and within his own
circle Dickens, no doubt, knew many young
barristers who went through the struggle of
professional life of which Tommy Traddles
was the impersonation.

Uriah Heep as a lawyer's clerk, and
ultimately himself a legal practitioner, is
entirely devoid of interest. As a man, his
loyalty to his mother is, perhaps, the shadow
of a redeeming feature in his character ; but
as a lawyer he has no distinctive character at
all, and from the legal side he illustrates
nothing, unless it be that which is common
to every phase of business life — that the

66 Charles Dickens

hypocrite is bound, sooner or later, to reveal
himself, and that double-dealing usually
recoils on the head of the cheat.

The other lawyers who figure in " David
Copperfield " are Spenlow & Jorkins, the
Doctor's Commons practitioners to whom
David Copperfield became an articled clerk.
But Mr. Spenlow is of interest rather as the
father of Dora than as a lawyer, and his part-
ner Mr. Jorkins is of interest only as illustrat-
ing a favourite device of Dickens, of playing
off one partner of a legal firm against the
other. Dodson played off his partner Fogg,
Snitchey his partner Craggs, and Jorkins
was the bogey of the firm of Spenlow &
Jorkins. Says David Copperfield :

I was quite dismayed by the idea of this terrible
Jorkins. But I found out afterwards that he was a mild
man of a heavy temperament, whose place in the business
was to keep himself in the background and be constantly
exhibited by name as the most obdurate and ruthless of
men. If a clerk wanted his salary raised, Mr. Jorkins

and the Law 67

wouldn't listen to such a proposition. If a client were
slow to settle his bill of costs, Mr. Jorkins was resolved
to have it paid, and however painful these things might
be (and always were) to Mr. Spenlow's feelings, Mr.
Jorkins would have his bond. The heart and hand of
the good angel Spenlow would have been always open
but for the restraining demon Jorkins.

To which description of Mr. Jorkins David

quaintly adds :

As I have grown older, I think I have had experience
of some other houses doing business on the principle of
Spenlow & Jorkins.

The type of the provincial lawyer is

exemplified by Mr. Wickfield and Uriah

Heep in " David Copperfield," and by

Snitchey & Craggs in " The Batde of Life."

Wickfield and Heep of Canterbury had no

humour. Snitchey and Craggs were full of

the best kind of it, unconscious wit. When

Dr. Jeddler the philosopher, whose theory was

that nothing in life was serious, entertained

Snitchy and Craggs at breakfast the morning

the lawyers came to render an account of

68 Charles Dickens

their stewardship to Alfred Heathfield, the
doctor had quoted the French wit who had
expired with the remark, "The farce is ended;
draw the curtain."

" The French wit," said Mr. Snitchey, peeping sharply
into his blue bag, " was wrong. Dr. Jeddler, and your
philosophy is altogether wrong, depend upon it, as I
have often told you. Nothing serious in life ? What do
you call Law ? "

"A joke," rephed the doctor.

" Did you ever go to law? " asked Mr. Snitchey.

" Never," returned the doctor.

"If you ever do," said Mr. Snitchey, "perhaps you'll
alter that opinion."

How intensely humorous also is Snitchey's
description of the landscape of an old battle-
field, which they looked at from Dr. Jeddler's
garden.

Here's a smiling country, once overrun by soldiers,
trespassers every man of them, and laid waste by fire and
sword.

Only a Dickens imagination could have
conceived of an invading army as "tres-
passers " ! Then Snitchey goes on :

and the Law 69

" But take this smiling country as it stands, think of
the law appertaining to real property, to the bequest and
device of real property, to the mortgage and redemption
of real property, to leasehold, freehold, and copyhold
estate. Think," said Mr. Snitchey, with such emotion
that he actually smacked his Hps, "of the complicated
laws relating to title and proof of title, with all the
contradictory precedents and numerous Acts of Parlia-
ment connected with them. Think of the infinite
number of ingenious and interminable Chancery suits to
which this pleasant prospect may give rise, and
acknowledge, Dr. Jeddler, that there is a green spot in the
scheme about us."

Almost every utterance of these two
lawyers in "The Battle of Life" is humorous,
and the story is full of legal sidelights, of
which I shall mention only one, which to me
has always seemed as full of humour as
anything Dickens ever wrote. Two
witnesses being required to Alfred's discharge
to his trustees, Britain the serving man, and
Clemency Newcombe the maid, were called
to sign as witnesses. Every lawyer who has
had occasion to requisition the services of

70 Charles Dickens

country persons of no experience to witness
a deed knows how true to life is the descrip-
tion of the male and the female witness,
the seriousness of the one, the frivolity of
the other, and the deliberateness of both.

How Britain approached the deeds under protest, and
by dint of the doctor's coercion, and insisted on pausing
to look at them before writing, and also on turning them
round to see whether there was anything fraudulent
underneath, and how, having signed his name, he
became desolate, as one who had parted with his property
and rights, I want the time to tell, also how the blue
bag containing his signature afterwards had a mysterious
interest for him, and he couldn't leave it; also how
Clemency Newcombe, in an ecstasy of laughter at the
idea of her own importance and dignity, brooded over
the whole table with her two elbows, like a spread eagle,
and reposed her head upon her left arm, as a preliminary
to the formation of certain cabalistic characters, which
required a deal of ink, and imaginary counterparts
whereof she executed at the same time with her tongue.

The most unsavoury type of lawyer in all
Dickens' writings is Mr, Sampson Brass
in the "Old Curiosity Shop." He is a figure

and the Law yi

only a degree less repulsive than his client
Mr. Daniel Quilp.

This Brass was an attorney of no very good repute,
from Bevis Marks in the City of London; he was a
tall, meagre man with a nose like a wen, and a protruding
forehead, retreating eyes, and hair, of a deep red. He
wore a long black surtout reaching nearly to his ankles,
short black trousers, high shoes, and cotton stockings of
a bluish grey. He had a cringing manner, but a very
harsh voice ; and his blandest smiles were so extremely
forbidding that, to have had his company under the
least repulsive circumstance, one would have wished him
to be out of temper that he might only scowl.

His first appearance is at the making of an
inventory of the contents of the Old Curiosity
Shop, when Quilp, the inexorable creditor,
entered upon possession. H is last appearance
is when the law which he had outraged
overtook him in retribution, and the sentence
of the Court was :

That he should, for a term of years, reside in a spacious
mansion, where several other gentlemen were lodged
and boarded at the public charge, who went clad in a

72 Charles Dickens

sober uniform of grey turned up with yellow, had their
hair cut extremely short, and chiefly lived on gruel and
light soup.

The career of Mr. Sampson Brass is one
continuous record of knavery. He is the
only lawyer in the Dickens collection
absolutely without any redeeming grace.
He had not even a sense of humour, unless
it be credited to him for humour that he
employed his sister, Sally Brass, as "his
clerk, assistant, housekeeper, secretary,
confidential plotter, adviser, intriguer, and
bill of costs increaser."

Sally Brass holds a unique place amongst
the law clerks of Dickens, not merely because
she is the only female law clerk, but also
because she not only managed her brother's
business, but managed her brother himself.
The nearest approach to Miss Sally Brass
amongst the numerous law clerks is Mr.
Bazzard in " Edwin Drood," the confidential

and the Law 73

clerk of Mr. Grewgious, of whom his master
rather stood in awe, much as Mr. Sampson
Brass stood in awe of his sister. Dickens'
description of Miss Brass once more
illustrates how there was ever present to
his mind a fixed hostility to the law and
all its ways :

In mind, she was of a strong and vigorous turn,
having from her earliest youth devoted herself with
uncommon ardour to the study of the law ; not wasting
her speculations upon its eagle flights, which are rare,
but tracing it attentively through all the slippery and
eel-like crawlings in which it commonly pursues its way.

The last word about Mr. Sampson Brass
is in the author's best satirical vein :

His name was erased and blotted out from the roll of
attorneys ; which erasure has been always held in these
latter times to be a great degradation and reproach, and
to imply the commission of some amazing villainy — as
indeed it would seem to be the case, when so many
worthless names remain among its better records,
unmolested.

74 Charles Dickens

One would like to think that Sampson Brass
was an exception to the general rule that
every Dickens lawyer is a type, and to re-
gard Mr. Brass as an excrescence rather than
as a natural feature in the legal profession ;
but modern experience is too strong for this
pleasing assumption. Since Dickens' day,
and not least conspicuously within recent
years, not a few lawyers have ended their
careers in the dock ; and it is to be feared
that the type is not yet extinct of the lawyer
who, from greed of gain, lends his professional
aid to the tortuous devices of an unscrupu-
lous client, and ends by finding himself with
too much time for reflection within prison
walls.

Sampson Brass is the picture of one
kind of professional failure in life. There
is a different type of failure, and a much
sadder one, in " A Tale of Two Cities,"
for Sydney Carton, in some respects the

and the Law 75

most lovable character created by Dickens,
was a lawyer, although that fact is
apt to be forgotten, because the interest
which centres round him does not move on
the legal plane. I speak of him, of course,
only in his legal aspect. Whilst personally
he was the kind of man who would lay
down his life for his friend, I am afraid that
professionally he is also the type of man,
not unknown in the legal world, who
degrades his talents. The only aspect in
which he is presented from the strictly
legal side is that of what is called
"devilling" to Mr. Stryver, the advocate
who defended Charles Darnay at the trial
for treason.

Mr. Stryver was a man of little more than thirty, but
looking twenty years older than he was, stout, loud, red,
bluff, and free from any drawback of delicacy.

It had once been noted at the bar that while Mr.
Stryver was a glib man, and an unscrupulous, and a
ready, and a bold, he had not that faculty of extracting

76 Charles Dickens

the essence from a heap of statements which is among
the most striking and necessary of the advocate's
accompHshments. But a remarkable improvement came
upon him as to this. The more business he got, the
greater his power seemed to grow of getting at its pith
and marrow, and however late at night he sat carousing
with Sydney Carton, he always had his points at his
finger ends in the morning.

The explanation was simple. Sydney
Carton was supplying the brains, and Stryver
was getting the success. It is a sad picture
that of the jackal and the lion carousing
together whilst Carton did the " boiling
down " of the busy advocate's papers, which
on the morrow Stryver should use to further
his success, whilst poor Carton's work was
unrecognised. Unutterably sad is the reflec-
tion of this clever, but lost, lawyer as he
walked home in the early morning after a
carousal with Stryver :

Waste forces within him, and a desert all around, this
man stood still on his way across a silent terrace and saw
for a moment lying in the wilderness before him a mirage

and the Law

77

of honourable ambition, self-denial, and perseverance;
sadly, sadly the sun rose ; it was upon no sadder sight
than the man of good abilities and good emotions,
incapable of their directed exercise, incapable of his own
help and his own happiness, sensible of the blight on him
and resigning himself to let it eat him away,

I am afraid that in the law, as in other
walks of life, there are many failures, of
whom Sydney Carton is a type.

I have barely tapped the legal mine of
interest in Dickens. I have but glanced at
some of the more outstanding aspects of the
subject, and the more outstanding personali-
ties. There are other aspects, and other
individuals, over whom one would like to
linger and to speculate. Delightful possi-
bilities seem to lurk in many of the minor
legal characters, such as Mr. Phunky, the
bashful junior counsel for Pickwick, or the
roisterous Lowton, Mr. Perker's clerk, and
the law clerks who held high revel under his
presidency at The Magpie and Stump, or

78 Charles Dickens

the meek-mannered Jackson, the clerk of
Dodson & Fogg. But to exhaust the legal
interest in the works of Charles Dickens
would want a bulky volume.

Some of the Dickens lawyers are eccentric
and some commonplace ; some are dry-as-
dust, some very human ; no two of them are
alike, and each is typical of a class to be
found in the legal profession in the present
day, just as in the time of Dickens. That,
by his writings, Dickens drew public attention
to some of the cruel features of the law as it
existed in his day, especially as regards
imprisonment for debt, and that his writings
were a powerful factor in removing or soften-
ing hard features of the judicial system, there
is no doubt. But there are anomalies and
evils denounced in his books still unremedied.
There is yet a wide field open to the Dickens
student, in the judicial aspect of Dickens'
works, and my aim has been accomplished if

and the Law 79

I have been able, in some degree, to flash a
little light upon this undeveloped mine of
interest, and in some small measure to
create, as regards the attitude of Charles
Dickens to the law, a desire on the part of
others to inquire further into a subject so
teeming with interest.

Xhree Books for
Dickensians.

DICKENS AND THE DRAMA.

By S. J. ADAIR FITZ^QERALD,

Author of " Stories of Famous Songs," &c.

Crown Svo. js. net.

"THIS volume deals with the whole subject of Dickens and the stage
in such a comprehensive manner as to render it the authoritative
book of reference for all students of the Drama and Dickens. Mr.
Fitz-Gerald, who has been a dramatic critic and recognised theatrical
historian for years, writes chiefly from personal knowledge of his
subject. But he has consulted and studied all the known authorities
in making his book complete, and has been able to correct and amplify
previous writers on the theme. In the early portion of his volume
Mr. Fitz-Gerald touches on Dickens's youthful days and his interest
and performances in amateur theatricals, and on those more ambitious
efforts in later life for charity. After dwelling in an interesting chapter
on Dickens as a Dramatist, Mr. Fitz-Gerald proceeds to deal with
plays that have been created out of each work of the novelist. The
volume will contain some curious and interesting illustrations.

SHORT PLAYS FROM DICKENS.

By H. B. BROWNE, M.A.

Illustrated. Second Edition. Crown Svo. 2s. 6d. net.

HTHESE plays are designed to meet a growing demand for short
actable plays from the works of Dickens. They have been selected
and arranged from Dickens's books with as little alteration as possible
in the text, and with the object of bringing out the characteristics of
the persons represented. They are intended for a small stage, with
little or no scenery, and with as few effects as possible, for a small
number of players, and for an average length of time of fifteen minutes
each.

The Posthumous Papers of the
Pickwick Club*

By CHARLES DICKENS.

Wiih 24 Illustratio7is in colour and upwards of 100 in
black and white.

By CECIL ALDIN.

Two volumes. Imperial 8vo. 2ls. net.

An edition limited to 250 on hand-made paper, each signed by the

artist, £3 3s.

QF all the artists who have illustrated the numerous editions of
Dickens's immortal book, none, we venture to assert, has caught
the spirit of the great writer's humour, realised the characteristics of
the notable persons of the book more faithfully, and presented the
atmosphere and the surroundings of the period in which the story is
laid, with more truthfulness, and in more perfect harmony with the
text than has Mr. Cecil Aldin in this edition. Whilst retaining the
outward appearance of the characters by which the world has come
to recognise them, Mr. Aldin has not exaggerated their own special
peculiarities, nor made them in the least caricatures of what their
creator meant them to be.

Each of the twenty-four coloured plates is a perfect picture, whilst
the one hundred black and white illustrations in the text form in them-
selves a pictorial narrative of the wonderful peregrinations of the
famous club, absolutely correct as regards the details. The Cecil
Aldin Pickwick will undoubtedly be the book of the year. Already
all the hand-made paper edition has been disposed of to the book-
sellers.

LONDON: CHAPMAN & HALL, LIMITED.

Notable Scottish Trials.

The Scotsman — " Messrs. William Hodge & Co. are doing good
public service in issuing a series of volumes dealing with ' Notable
Scottish Trials.' Since many of these trials took place a new generation
has arisen, to whom most of the persons tried are mere names, and the
series promised by Messrs. Hodge & Co. will necessarily take the form
of educative works of considerable historic value."

LIST OP VOLUMES.

Price 5s. net each.

Madeleine Smith. Edited by A. Duncan Smith, F.S.A.
(Scot.), Advocate.

Dr. Pritchard. Edited by Wm. Roughead, W.S., Edin-
burgh.

The City of Glasgow Bank Directors. Edited by Wm.
Wallace, Advocate, Sheriff-Substitute, Oban.

Eugene Marie Chantrelle. Edited by A. Duncan
Smith, F.S.A.(Scot.), Advocate.

Deacon Brodie. Edited by Wm. Roughead, W.S., Edin-
burgh.

James Stewart (The Appin Murder). Edited by David
N. Mackay, Writer, Glasgow.

A. J. Monson. Edited by J. W. More, B.A.(Oxon.),
Advocate.

The Douglas Cause. Edited by A. Francis Steuart,
Advocate.

Captain Porteous. Edited by Wm. Roughead, W.S.,
Edinburgh.

Oscar Slater. Edited by Wm. Roughead, W.S., Edinburgh.
IN PREPARATION.

Jessie M'Lachlan. Edited by Wm. Roughead, W.S.,
Edinburgh.

Lord Lovat. Edited by David N. Mackay, Writer, Glasgow.

WM. HODGE & CO., Edinburgh and Glasgow.

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